Tuesday, December 30, 2008

"Professors, librarians and others have proposed that the U.S. Copyright Office significantly expand its list of when, and by whom, DVDs and other audiovisual materials should be exempted from technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. (...) To back up: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, generally prohibited the circumvention of technologies that control access to copyrighted material — for example, making it difficult to copy music or scenes or snippets from movies. But the law also set up a process by which the Library of Congress's Copyright Office, every three years, considers exemptions to that prohibition when petitioners can prove that the limitation substantially and adversely affects their ability to make 'non-infringing' uses of copyrighted works", berichtet Inside Higher Ed heute.

Im Jänner wird das Buch "Librarian by day" (nein, diesmal nicht "Bacardi by night") von Paige Tyler bei Whiskey Creek Press Torrid erscheinen. Zum Inhalt: "Shy, reserved librarian Jennifer Davidson has a secret side that few people know about. She writes erotic spanking romances on the side. She's never been spanked herself, but when her boyfriend stumbles across one of her books, all that changes"...

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

"Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today's librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond" ("Best Careers 2009: Librarian", US News, 11. Dezember 2008. Hinweis aus nexgenlib).

Patent 6050714 vom 18. April 2000, eingereicht von Livio Isabella: "Musical Christmas tree having illuminable branches" ("A Christmas tree having illuminable branches includes a hollow base component having an elongated trunk member vertically extending therefrom. A plurality of fiber optic cables are received within the trunk member and extend into the base component through which a lamp transmits light via a rotating color wheel. The lamp is in communication with a sound producing means and a circuit for varying the intensity of light according to the output of the sound producing means").

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

"Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves"

Friday, December 05, 2008

B. Lee Cooper: "Christmas Songs: Audio Barometers of Tradition and Social Change in America, 1950 - 1987". In: Social Studies 79 (1988) 6, S. 278 - 280. "Shows how Christmas songs can be used as illustrations of historical information, cultural borrowing, and social change. Describes a method which can aid discussion of social change and public perception by dividing songs into tracks: (1) traditional and nontraditional and (2) secular and sacred" (ERIC).

In "Katherine's Diary. The Story of a transsexual", im November 2008 neu aufgelegt bei BookSurge Publishing, schildert die australische Bibliothekarin Katherine Cummings ihren langen Weg vom verheirateten Vater dreier Kinder John Cummings zur Frau, die sie heute ist. - Das Buch wurde 1992 mit dem Australian Human Rights Award for Non Fiction ausgezeichnet. Rezensionen u.a. beim australischen Gender Centre.Der Text "The life and loves of an XY woman" kann online gelesen werden: "Sometimes, with no intent to deceive, I hear myself saying 'When I was a little girl, I ...' and I pull myself up and examine this false memory that has been created from my knowledge of other women's childhoods, or from childhoods absorbed from my sister's story books and from my longing from earliest infancy to be female. There is a deep underlying desire in me for a complete life but a complete life is something I will never have".

AACE-Blog, das Weblog der Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, "an international, not-for-profit, educational organization with the mission of advancing Information Technology in Education and E-Learning research, development, learning, and its practical application": noch so neu, dass bei "about" noch steht "This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from" ;-)

William E. Studwell: "Tracking Down the Elusive Christmas Song: A Problem for Libraries". In: Popular Culture in Libraries 5 (1997) 1, S. 39 - 42. "Locating accurate historical data on Christmas songs can be problematic, as can be finding the text or a recording of obscure Christmas songs. This essay discusses the situation, and offers some practical advice in resolving the difficulties" (Haworth Press)